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One's personality is both a composition and reflection, but if I have to choose one of them, I will choose reflection as the "self" is more important to me than "me". One's composition may change, walking across the cultural landscapes and climbing the social ladder but one's self is tied to one's reflections. The fun part is that reflections are not bound to "Time-Space" barriers ( it is not time-space) and respective mental constructs, which have grown so thick over ages, that they had reduced the image of humans to Sisyphus, rolling different sizes of boulders on hills of different heights.… As the name of this Blog indicates, knols are my perspectives on topics of interests, sweet/bitter experiences or just doodling :)

Monday, November 28, 2011

Liberal Socialism

History is the greatest test of human imaginations. Though we are not in end of history to that our judgments become a final decision on human experiences and knowledge but still we have seen the rise and fall of great human imaginations and experiences based on these imaginations. We have seen the fall of socialist economic system and free market economy. We have also seen the clashes between religions (crusades), religion and science (Trial of Galileo), ideologies (Cold war), cultures (Clash of civilization/ war on terror) and clash between empires (From dawn of human history it has never stopped).

From all these clashes we have two main things that are the core of all other things,

1- Freedom of religions, ideologies, expressions, learning and trade is natural and irresistible.
2- There are individuals that can’t support and protect themselves in merciless competitions of free economy and can’t express themselves. This inability to survive economically and culturally is called poverty. Hence it is the responsibility of state and society to protect them and help them to survive by an acceptable standard of life.

Certainly, these two core lessons of history can be best expressed by term social liberalism. Social, because state and society is responsible to continually struggle against poverty and people unable to compete is protected by state and society. Liberal it is called, because the freedom of people and individuals are protected.

Still this term and this practice are not new. Netherland liberal social policies and liberal democrats of Britain have the approaches of mixing liberalism and socialism. But our resolve here is not again based on historical lessons which have different approaches from the mixing of socialism and capitalism.

We start our liberal socialism by accepting a few bitter historical lessons as follows,

1- The main clash is not between cultures, civilizations, ideologies and religions. These are cultural units of societies that are used by administrative units of societies which are political parties, multinational companies, special interest groups and states. As these administrative units are always struggling for power and the expansions of their powers by every means so we call them, Empires and their clashes as “Clash of Empires”.
2- Once it is decided that Clash of Empires is an essential and inevitable part of history then we have to divide the empires into legitimate and illegitimate empires. Why we should accept Empires before we talk about legitimacy and illegitimacy of empires? Growth is a natural process and growth has to expand and it is not stoppable. It will find its legal or structural ways to expand. We have a Hazaragi proverb that says, “You can’t keep chick under the basket forever. It has to grow out of size of basket”. It is a natural process that when a chick grow it has to expand its territory to survive. Same is in case of men but here it is economical and cultural expansions that are important not military expansions. We define empire as, “Any administrative unit that has expansionist policies is an empire. So we can find states as empires, multinational company as an empire, a religious organization as an empire, a political party as an empire and a special interest group or an organization as an empire. Once we have defined empire then we can categorize empires into two groups of liberal socialist empires and colonial empires. Empires that respect human rights, freedom of religions, ideologies, learning, trade and mobility of people and is responsible for social welfare of people is called liberal socialist empire and their expansion is natural. On other hands an empire that violates any of above conditions is an unnatural empire and hence we call them colonial empire and people must resist them.

3- Democracy is expanding as a popular and natural form of government as masses are empowered. But men have experienced the tyranny of majority and corrupt use of power by majority. Similarly people have experienced the tyranny of rich and elite groups in democracy because they have the resources to openly compete by controlling media and buying votes and representatives of people. These two main reasons caused the fall of leadership of countries in hands of corrupt and incapable groups that rule people and ruin their futures. Hence it is needed to change the structure of present day democracy to ensure the participation of all who have roots in people. Democracy shouldn’t be the rule of majority or rule of elite group but rule of people. It is possible by giving share of governance based on percentage of votes that a group achieves not based on majority and hence democracy shouldn’t be game of winning and defeating and making society divided and most of time to failure of democracy. Another serious illness of democracy has been lack of merit in legitimacy of political parties and individuals who stand for elections. To bring most able people and parties to leadership of people it is necessary that individuals and political parties prove their social services and democratic behaviors to behaviors to become legitimate for participation in elections.

4- Religious authorities largely tyrants in history of men. The coalition of church and monarch in dark ages in Christian world and the support of Sultans by religious authorities in Muslim world have kept both worlds’ masses impoverished. Hence religions shouldn’t be exceptional in way to governance. Religious representatives should come to governance through democratic process and should respect the decisions of people to let the religious groups become liberators not tyrants and hence religious groups become more tolerant for each other and stop killing of people by name of religion or God.

5- Liberty doesn’t mean freedom without accountability. Being free means great responsibility of knowing others rights to not violate them because it is a crime to attack others rights and freedom. Teaching students of their rights as well as others rights and respecting them is what make individuals brave enough to take responsible of their actions against others as well as enjoying and exercising their own rights and freedom. Hence freedom requires awareness, learning and is responsibility. It is really an expensive responsibility to keep eye on your own actions and expressions as well as administration units to not snatch freedoms under any name or by thick shadowing.

6- Classes existed from dawn of human history till now and no society even socialist societies could erase them down. Classes are natural as diversity and capacities of individuals are diverse. Hence class struggle is unnatural and a wrong approach. Yes! Poverty could be erased so there shouldn’t struggle against classes but against poverty. Struggle for equality in society is wrong because class system is natural but struggle for equality before laws is justified.

7- Culture is not the product of the high class. It is the products of identity. The most sensitive and conscious people who value their identity enrich and diversify cultures. These types of people may belong to any class of society but it is true that cultures are exploited by high class. As villages are deeply connected with their lands and traditions so during cultural revivals the elite and ruling classes return to their roots for their identities. Rural areas the cultural museum of a nation as they give meaning to eroding cultures of villages and evolving them to survive in flood of cultural mixings and exchanges.

8- Knowledge is a cyclic process and reasoning is arbitrary. Only arbitrary reasoning satisfies minds. When we are confused, it is because we are missing the position of our point in the orbit or cyclic. Sure! It is a better acceptance and human ego will not accept it at first hand as human imaginations are free without any boundaries. But these free imaginations become compel to accept arbitrary reasoning in order to become understandably expressible. Why reasoning is arbitrary is simple. All the processes of nature is cyclic and in order to express and found the reasons we have to related to nature and it become all cyclic. It does not mean we are limited and are in inescapable prison of arbitrary reason but we expand and move cyclic not in linear.

9- When we found arbitrary nature of reasoning and our movements in arbitrary manner then we come to our spirit which is also move arbitrarily around two elements, Love of God and Love of men. These two loves are inseparable. The love of God is tested in love of men. The greatest liar is one who claim love of God and hate His creations. Spirituality is natural and is connection between God and human through love of His creatures. Spirit knows only one language and that is love.

10- Races are the biological expressions of nature and as nature diversify and changes so are the races. Men has a unique position in expression of knowledge and that is though men can’t control their evolution but they like nature can express themselves by their developments. What nature express in millions of years men express in decades.

11- Accepting racial, cultural and geographical boundaries as natural expressions are accepting nature and denying racial, cultural and geographical boundaries are denying nature. All conflicts out of denying are unnatural and hence crime.

12- Globalization is a natural process as mobility and migrations are characteristics of life. Freedom of movements of people, interactions and trade across borders are natural rights of men.

13- Global institutions which are representatives of all nations of globe are only legitimate if its structures include the representations of the nations based on their percentage in world. Veto power is the signature of colonial power and is undemocratic and unnatural hence under veto power the global institutions lose their legitimacy. Global institutions are responsible for ensuring liberty and social welfare of people of the globe without any discrimination.